They say it’s just a coincidence, but Metal Hurlant and its US offshoot Heavy Metal both currently have comeback anthologies on Kickstarter. And both are huge successes.
The Metal Hurlant campaign published by Humanoids ended in a few hours and raised $581,432 from 3,847 backers. Contributors include:
“Clean and Clear” by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Jacob Edgar “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” by writer Matt Fraction and artist Afif Khaled “Peppermint Wendy” by cartoonist Milan Kim ” “Retrograde” by writer Carla Pacheco and artist Sagar “Light of Light” by cartoonist Simon Roy “Laws of Physics” by cartoonist Matthew Sheen “Hot Ground” by Cartoonist Shofela “Shoff” & Shobo Coker “Red Planet Tomatoes” by Cartoonist James Stockoe “The Light” by Cartoonist Ellie Ort Writer Jake Thomas and Artist Jorg De・“New Dawn” by Voss “Nightmare Motel” by cartoonist Hélène Usdin “The Naked King” by writer Fabien Wehrmann and artist Lionel “Alfred” Papagari “Alter” by writer Mark Waid and artist Jean-Michel Ponzio
Also includes archival material from Möbius, Philippe Drouillet, Jean-Pierre Dionnet, Robert Crumb, Casa, Nicole Clavereux, Michio Hisauchi, Angus Mackie, Jean-Claude Mézières, Chantal Montelier, and Trina Robbins. .
This anthology is planned as a continuum with each issue having 272 pages.
Meanwhile, heavy metal is also making a comeback after a somewhat controversial turn of events. The magazine is under new management, which has promised to settle debts owed to previous contributors. Heavy Metal’s Kickstarter has 18 days left and has already raised $433,996 from 5,005 backers. So it looks like it might even outperform the original.
Contributors to this anthology include:
Greg Hildebrandt Frank Frazetta Enqui Villar Vicente Segreles Michael Conrad Dan Brereton Brian Viveros Dan Quintana NYCHOS Skinner Keron Grant Leah Moore, John Repion Anna Morozova Joe Linsner Antonio Segura Jose Oritz Janewski Tim Vigil David Quinn Luca Strati John Workman Paul Kirchner Craig Wilson
The campaign mentions Heavy Metal Issue #1, which appears to be an ongoing project.
Backstory: The original Metal Hurlant was launched as a comic magazine in France in 1974 under founders Möbius, Philippe Drouillet and Jean-Pierre Dionnet. Featuring the trippy science fiction and fantasy of Möbius, Enki Bilal, and many other masters, it quickly became a classic in France.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Heavy Metal was launched in 1977 as a magazine owned by National Lampoon. It started with a licensing effort from Metal Harland, but soon established its own superstars, including Richard Corben. However, the material was executed in common across both titles.
Both magazines were very much of their time, featuring rugged heroes, topless heroines, and comics as mind-altering substances.
Metal Hurlant ceased publication in France in 1987, but was revived in 2002 by Fabrice Giger, who acquired Humanoids in 1988. Humanoids moved to Los Angeles in 2013 and has been a mostly US-based publisher ever since. We’ve stopped, restarted, and restarted many times, but we’ve basically continued to publish comics and graphic novels in some form fairly consistently.
Heavy metal has a much more complicated history, including its sale to Kevin Eastman in 1992 for $500,000 (about $1.1 million in 2024 dollars). Eastman filed for bankruptcy in 2014, and a lot has happened to its owners and investors since then. For a concise explanation, refer back to Heavy Metal Scholar RM Rose’s The Uncertain Death of Heavy Metal magazine.
We reached out to a spokesperson who owns Heavy Metal for information on the current version, but did not receive a response. Perhaps that’s a topic for another day.
And what is the current relationship between the two brands? That’s another mystery. In 2016, Giger was interviewed by Futurism magazine and was asked just such a question.
FG: We’ve met the new owners who seem nice, but we don’t really know them. I still believe to some extent that the true spirit of heavy metal is the spirit of metal harland. For the most part, they’ve been riding the wave that started in the ’70s. Those content licensing deals and creative deals happened before me. At the time, probably because the cost was lower, they decided not to publish humanoid content and use materials that were not at the same level of quality. In a spiritual sense, there was clearly a difference of opinion between the two brands at the time. Although they have gone in other directions, such as big boobs, Humanoids has invested heavily in creating new content and building a strong catalog of IP.
But I think a lot has happened in the eight years since then, so maybe it’s time for an update.
In any case, whichever version you prefer, MH/HM’s best weird and spicy tales were at the pinnacle of comics at the time and are still read to this day. What the equivalent of 2024 is is for more enthusiastic editors than me to decide. But based on the success of both Kickstarters, readers want to know, too.
Something like this:
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